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June 29, 2025
Key Developments and What We're Discussing Today:
- Today, June 29, marks 632 days since October 7, 2023. The Hamas-led attack on Simchat Torah resulted in 1,182 fatalities (including 44 Americans) and over 4,000 wounded. 251 hostages (210 alive, 41 dead bodies) were taken during a day of brutal savagery and sexual violence. It was the largest single massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, with more than one in every 10,000 Israelis killed, and the third overall deadliest terrorist attack in the world to date.
- The 50 remaining hostages, 27 known to be dead, 20 thought to be alive, and three of unknown status, include the bodies of two Americans: Omer Neutra and Itay Chen. Releasing all the hostages might not be priorities for Trump and Netanyahu, but it's a top priority for us.
- It now appears that the result of Trump's incoherent Iran strategy is an Iran capable and incentivized to move faster to develop nuclear weapons. Even under the increasingly implausible scenario that Trump's strikes obliterated the three Iranian nuclear sites, Iran would still be capable of quickly developing nuclear weapons because Trump telegraphed the attacks, allowing Iran to move highly enriched uranium out of the facilities.
- Trump and his supporters have quietly dropped demands that Iran stop its support for terrorism as a criterion for measuring success.
- Trump is now reportedly considering helping Iran access as much as $30 billion to build a civilian-energy-producing nuclear program, easing sanctions, and freeing up billions of dollars in restricted Iranian funds. He was calling for Iran's "unconditional surrender" earlier this month.
- Trump's strikes broke the law. His egregious disregard for the law is unprecedented.
- Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City. You can read about what that means and doesn't mean in the In Case You Missed It section of the newsletter. The co-chair of the Congressional Jewish Caucus, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), endorsed him following his victory.
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Hi Steve,
Last Sunday morning, Israel recovered the bodies of three hostages: Ofra Keidar, Jonathan Samerano, and Staff Sgt. Shay Levinson. The remaining 50 must be released now, and that means ending the war in Gaza. Nimrod Novik is concerned that Trump is not prioritizing release of the hostages and suggests a role for Saudi Arabia.
More questions than answers about Trump's strikes on Iran. War triggers something primal in us. Our first instinct is to rally around the flag, to rally around the tribe. It's a natural survival instinct. The question is whether an instinct that served us well 200,000 years ago still does.
We should not oppose military action per se. The question should always be whether we can best achieive our objectives through diplomacy or military action. If I thought that Trump's military strikes obliterated Iran's nuclear facilities and prevented Iran from developing nuclear weapons for years to come, I'd applaud him for it, and today's newsletter would have been titled "Mission Accomplished."
Too many organizations and people in our community immediately took a corrupt, serial liar's word that the strikes on Iran's nuclear site achieved their objectives. They had no idea how much damage they caused or how much highly enriched uranium Iran may have hidden elsewhere, but that didn't stop them from showering Trump with praise.
It reminded me of when George W. Bush invaded Iraq. Finally, a president who wasn't afraid to use force and would solve Iraq once and for all. No more pussy-footing around with diplomacy, which is weak. Bombing demonstrates strength and guarantees complete success. Right? Wrong.
We need to stop mistaking hawkishness for pro-Israel and mistaking willingness to use force for strength. The loudest Trump supporters are unwittingly illustrating the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Trump has been all over the place, yet nothing he says or does shakes the small Republican Jewish community's faith in him. He tried to negotiate with Iran. He called for Iran's unconditional surrender. He called for regime change. Then he said no regime change. Then he declared a ceasefire and said the war was over, even though neither the U.S. nor Israel had achieved its military objectives.
Trump and his supporters quietly dropped their demands that Iran stop arming its proxies and supporting terrorism throughout the world. Ending Iranian terrorism no longer seems to be a criterion for judging any Iran policy's success except the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that Trump walked away from.
Trump used obscenity when he lashed out at Israel in public. In the same rant, he lumped Iran and Israel together. Republicans feigned outrage when they claimed that Democrats slammed Israel and played the both sides game, but it's Trump this time, so all good. If this isn't the definition of a cult, I don't know what is.
Trump is now reportedly considering helping Iran access as much as $30 billion to build a civilian-energy-producing nuclear program, easing sanctions, and freeing up billions of dollars in restricted Iranian funds. Remember the $6 billion outrage under Biden?
Did Trump's attacks stop or significantly delay Iran's nuclear program? Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL) concedes that "if the goal of the mission was to make a bomb go boom, then yes, it was a success."
But what if the goals were more ambitious?
Leaked classified information shows that the attacks did not destroy Iran's nuclear facilities, that they set back Iran's nuclear program by at most a few months, and that Iran moved most of its uranium stockpiles before the strikes. The information is legitimate, but it is a preliminary assessment, an important caveat.
However, we now know that the U.S. did not use bunker-busting bombs on one of the three sites because the site is so deep that the bombs likely would not have been effective.
Arms control expert Kelsey Davenport points out that even if, as Trump continues to claim, the U.S. strikes did destroy the three nuclear facilities, "Iran does not need to completely rebuild all 3 to pose a proliferation threat. If some centrifuges & [highly enriched uranium] survived, Iran can move more quickly to weaponize or retain threshold status."
How quickly? James Acton estimates that it would take Iran 10-20 days to produce a bomb's worth of highly enriched uranium. Acton walks us through his reasoning in this thread.
Because Trump telegraphed the strikes in public pronouncements, Iran moved highly enriched uranium out of the sites before the U.S. attacked. We don't know where it is or how much there is.
Max Boot writes, "History teaches that it is nearly impossible to eradicate a nuclear program by air power alone. Failing a ground invasion — something that no one is contemplating in the case of Iran — the only viable option to guarantee denuclearization is a binding international agreement. The irony is that President Barack Obama had negotiated just such an agreement with Iran in 2015 — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — but Trump foolishly pulled out of it in 2018, leading Iran to accelerate its enrichment of uranium.
"The Iran nuclear deal had its flaws. But as long as Iran abided by it — and there were international inspections to ensure that it did — Tehran was prevented from moving toward a nuclear weapon for at least 15 years. Even the most optimistic scenarios of the damage achieved by U.S. and Israeli airstrikes suggest that they delayed the Iranian program by a much, much shorter length of time."
Trump made a diplomatic agreement harder and may have convinced Iran that for its own safety, it needs nuclear weapons. We will not be able to bomb Iranian sites if we no longer know where they are.
It gets worse. Paul Glastris interviewed a longtime military and intelligence insider who explained that the failure to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites may have weakened U.S. power far beyond the Middle East.
The failure of the bunker-busting bombs to destroy Iran's facilities proved to Iran that the most fearsome weapon we were willing to use "can collapse the entrances of tunnels but not destroy facilities buried deeply in a mountain...
"And not just Iran. Every other adversarial regime now knows these weapons are essentially duds. That weakens our leverage considerably with all of them. I am sure Kim Jung Un is happy in North Korea today."
What about Trump's claim, contrary to the leaked Defense Intelligence Agency report, that the nuclear facilities were completely destroyed? "I’d say that’s not going to fly. If I’m the Iranians, I’m going to clear the rubble from the entrances of those facilities and then invite CNN and Al Jazeera to bring their cameras into the tunnels and show that they’re still there, still functional."
Trump's strikes broke the law. Oh yeah, that too. Arguments that other presidents did it rely on the same solid legal principle that little kids use when caught doing something wrong. Most of us grow out of using the "everyone else did it so why should I get in trouble" defense.
Assuming for the time that it takes you to read this sentence that what Trump did was similar to what previous presidents did, unlike previous presidents, Trump is corrupt, incompetent, ignorant, and displays authoritarian tendencies; if any president should be held strictly to the legal standards when it comes to war, it's Trump.
But what Trump did was unlike what previous presidents have done. Rep. Mike Levin (D-CA) has the receipts.
On Friday, every Democratic senator except John Fetterman (PA) voted for a resolution upholding Congress's constitutional authority. Every Republican senator except Rand Paul (KY) voted against it.
Iran is a theocratic state that has repeatedly vowed to destroy Israel and that has attacked Israel, whether via proxies or directly. Iran cannot be permitted to obtain nuclear weapons. This is no time for amateurs. Unfortunately, that's who we've got running the United States at this point.
On June 25, Laura Rozen quoted former top European Union Iran nuclear negotiator Enrique Mora:
“If Iran now decides to move towards a bomb, it will do so following a clear strategic logic. No one bombs the capital of a nuclear-armed country. June 21, 2025 may go down in history not as the day the Iranian nuclear program was destroyed, but as the day a nuclear Iran was irreversibly born.”
Nobel Peace Prize, anyone?
Corrections. I'm entitled to my own opinions but not to my own facts, so I appreciate it when readers bring errors to my attention. No one pointed out any substantive errors in last week's newsletter. There was one inconsequential typo.
This is an independent reader-supported newsletter. You're welcome to read for free, but if you get something out of this newsletter, you can give something back by credit card or PayPal, by Venmo @Steven-Sheffey, or by check. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
In Case You Missed It:
- What to read if you want to read about Zohran Mamdani:
Social Posts of the Week. PaulleyTicks and Will Stancil.
Thread of the Week. Dr. Jeffrey Lewis.
Video Clip of the Week. Imagine if America was a dictatorship.
Vintage Music Clip of the Week. INXS--1991.
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I periodically update my posts on the IHRA definition of antisemitism and on why Democrats are better than Republicans on Israel and antisemitism. My definition of "pro-Israel" is here (it's a work in progress, as am I).
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